


Mothership

by Pouxin



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Miscarriage, Motherhood, Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-29
Updated: 2020-04-29
Packaged: 2021-03-02 04:54:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23909542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pouxin/pseuds/Pouxin
Summary: A lovesong to pregnancy and motherhood.  Spock and Jim: before they were born.This is written in the same universe as'The Door'and could be seen as a tiny companion piece to it.  PLEASE read the warnings before deciding whether to read the story!
Relationships: Amanda Grayson/Sarek, George Kirk/Winona Kirk
Comments: 7
Kudos: 25





	Mothership

**Author's Note:**

> **PLEASE NOTE** : This story contains reasonably graphic descriptions of miscarriage and discusses recurrent pregnancy loss. It also contains some really self-blamey stuff around miscarriage which is OBJECTIVELY NOT TRUE, but feels true to the character when I'm writing their POV. I'm writing about this from a place of experience, and I know well how triggering this can be at certain times so PLEASE DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER if you think this might be too much for you. I love you all BBs and only want you to have the nice things ♥

_**Winona** _

Every woman contains a universe inside her. I remember laying my hand on the soft swell of my belly, feeling the sharp peak of your elbow. The endless possibility of it was staggering, like staring out into the full spray of the sky from the deck of a starship. The infinite, breath-taking potential of it all. You could be anything. You could be everything. My son. 

I know folks were surprised when I had Sam. I guess I didn’t seem exactly like the maternal type. I had always been ambitious, focussed. Hard. Kind of a bitch. You know what made me maternal? George Kirk. I always knew I wanted to have his babies. Back when I was in tenth grade and he was this hotshot senior football star, 4.0 GPA, headed for the Academy, I used to doodle his name over and over on my padd, ‘til I swear there was a permanent ‘G’ shaped dent in the plexiglass. Always in my fantasies then we had a family together. Me and my George and our kids, flying among the stars. 

I get what I want. Most of the time. 

I didn’t really date before George. None of those other guys were worth my time. I fucked them, yes, that was fun, and it was good practice. When George finally noticed me I wanted to know what I was doing. But I didn’t _date_ them. I suppose I was saving myself for him. Not my body, but my heart. 

And thoughts of George brought out the mother in me. It was impossible to look at his burnt cornfield hair without thinking of children running free under skies blotched with Iowan clouds. And his eyes. So blue. A Virgin kind of blue. So many medieval nativities, with Mary’s faced etched with both immediate joy and the promise of later sorrows, feature that kind of shade.

Kelsey Hannigan was the first person I spoke to about it, back in Riverside, when we’d finally got together when George came back from the Academy for Thanksgiving in ’27.

“Do you think I’d be a good mother?”

“A good _mother_ …? Jesus, girl. You’ve only just got with the guy.”

“But do you? Think I’d be good?”

“I think too much astronaut dick is making you soft.”

I _was_ a good mother. To Sam. 

And I would’ve been to you. 

My love, you have to believe that. If things had been different.

I loved being pregnant with you. With Sam I had been scared. Scared of the way my body was changing, scared of what might go wrong, scared every time he moved, scared every time he didn’t. With you, I felt relaxed, almost dreamy. It was like we were in a secret club, just the two of us; a secret slow club where my main concern was you, and I was all you knew. They had doppler equipment on the Kelvin, and every evening I would press it to my belly, just lying back and listening to the sonar bing of your tiny heart as I drifted to sleep. 

I think you knew what you were destined for. In every scan you were holding on tight to the umbilical cord like a spacewalk harness. My little cosmonaut. Floating weightless, curled inside the Zero-G of my womb.

You loved George, the father you never knew. Whenever he laid his hand on my stomach, you kicked, swimming up towards the warmth of his touch. He would laugh with delight: “We’ve got a fierce one here, Noan”. Sometimes you would kick at his hands so hard it was almost alarming. “Woah, there, little buddy. You just hang tight in there, enjoying your womb service. We’re not ready for you yet”. Your shining hero father.

And then you came into the world, bright and loud, amid all that fire and terror. 

There is a Kate Bush song: ‘If I only could, I’d make a deal with god / and I’d get him to swap our places’. Lying on that bed, wracked with contractions, listening to George’s voice on the comm, hearing the carefully buried note of terror in it: I made a deal then. I offered up your life for his. I mean, what were you to me then? You were a hope, a dream, a promise. George was real, the realest thing I had ever known.

Of course, I couldn’t even look at you afterwards. I held you in rigid arms, my face turned coldly away, my eyes glazed with hot tears. Not only was he gone, your father, my beloved one, but I had offered you in his place. What kind of mother does that? I had failed to protect you. I had been wrong all that time. I was not a good mother. I never would be.

My darling, darling boy.

I failed. Winona Kirk was not a failure. And yet I had failed at the most important test of my life. 

I know you felt it, growing up. The distance between us. The distance I put there. I wish you knew how I ached to go back to that time when we were the closest we’d ever been, when we were the only two members of our secret club, when you were anchored to me, my whole world, as I circled lazily through your orbit. Those days when your father’s love shone bright on both of us, and I laughed, and ran through those cornfields I’d always imagined, and the clouds in the sky were like scraps of cotton candy. 

And now every day I drift further into space. Further and further from the sun. Father and father from the son.

_**Amanda** _

Of course, all mothers think their children are a miracle of a kind, but you _were_ a miracle.

The chances of your birth were infinitesimal. I had always loved the beauty of maths, it sang to me, with its lovely pure tones. The music of the primes, du Sautoy called it. But the statistical likelihood of your conception sounded like the saddest song I had ever heard.

We saw a lot of doctors. Human doctors, Vulcan doctors. They all said the same thing. Our physiologies were too different. Mixed-species babies did exist, but they were incredibly rare. It was deeply unlikely that I could have children with your father.

They were right, in a way. For many years, there were no children. But getting pregnant: that part wasn’t the problem. The first time I was so excited. The second time too. And then the fear started to drown out the joy. I can’t explain to you what it’s like to live under the weight of that kind of waiting. To live with the knowing that the thing you most want will likely be taken away. 

I would check constantly. Am I still pregnant? Is the baby OK? The subtle slide of fingers under the gusset of my panties, like some oversexed schoolgirl. The brief dip inside, the check for red. In the dark, at night, unable to see the colour of any wetness I found there, I’d place my fingertips in my mouth, praying for the sweet salt tang of cunt, not the savage copper of blood.

All the pregnancies before you ended the same. A wet rush between my legs, a moment of helpless panic. And however hard I clenched myself up, it was never enough. Not enough to keep them. This body I had always been so proud of – not a temple, but a home, the house where I grew up – failing. Failing each and every time. 

The physical pain of it wasn’t so bad, I would numb myself to it, lie still in one of the quiet interior rooms of Sarek’s great cool house, let the cramps roll over me like a wave. I offered no resistance, my body an empty vessel, tossed around by the rippling agonies of the oceans, here and there. Do what you will with me. Even the actual loss of the babies themselves wasn’t the worse, the strange feeling of my cervix dilating, the wet slither of it. I learnt not to look, I would sit on the toilet until that part was over, and then I would just reach behind me and flush, as if all the previous yous were nothing more than unwanted fairground goldfish. Then I would go and lie in that room again, while my treacherous womb offered up the flotsam and jetsam of my hopes and dreams, bits of our shared bodies, all of-the-ocean, spawn and jelly, seaweeds of gristle. 

No, the worse was that first hot rush of blood, always unbidden though so fearfully expected, often unmarked by any pain. The scarlet mockery of it. 

One time I started screaming and screaming, and I could not stop. I stuffed my hands between my legs, violent, crazed with it. 

“NO NO NO NO NO NO NO!” 

The agony of the helplessness. 

Sarek found me that time, curled just like a foetus myself on the floor, shaking, eyes unseeing, thighs clawed to ribbons. 

He just held me then, the quiet dark strength of him, but later he tried to talk to me about it. I think I scared him. He didn’t know what to do with that part of me, that animal part. The Humaness of it. 

“My wife-”

“No.”

“My love, how many times must we-”

“No.”

Then:

“As many times as it takes.”

People said there must have been something wrong with the previous yous, so this was an act of mercy. My clever body doing us a favour, you and me both. But somewhere they were swimming, my little goldfish. My golden ones. Strong, perfect, free.

You were my thirteenth pregnancy, a number steeped in superstition in the Human world. _Leh-reh_ in Vulcan, it carried no such weight, but I liked the symmetry of it. I liked the softness of it in my mouth, it sounded like an endearment. It sounded like a prayer. I would murmur it to you, not with my mouth, but with my interior voice, my most secret, private voice, the voice only I and the yous could hear. _Leh-reh leh-reh, leh-reh_. 

Thirteen. The sixth prime number. The smallest emirp. One of only three known Wilson primes. A Fibonacci number. The third centred square number. 

In ancient Human cultures, the number thirteen represented femininity, because it corresponded with the number of menstrual cycles in a year. The number of lunar cycles too. I remember a girl at school calling our periods being “in tune with the moon”. 

Even here, on this moonless planet, did the moon of my home still call to me? Did it call to the tides of blood in my womb? Its sweet siren’s tune. 

Of course, the solar calendar triumphed over the lunar one, always the all-conquering Sun. Our thirteenth month lost, its very mention anathema. 

_Thirteen, thirteen, thirteen._

My lucky _leh-reh._

You hung on in there, my little leh-reh. You hung on, and every day was a miracle, every day I got to cross off the calendar inside my heart. The days until you were viable. Viable, liveable, breathable you. 

And there, there. I remember it so clearly, your birth. The perfect weight of you placed on my sternum. The feeling of your tiny pulse, skittering next to mine. My heart’s own darling.


End file.
